Abundance may be written with regard to summer fruits, the list numbering apricots, pears, plums, peaches, apples, grapes, figs, the custard apple, pomegranate, melon, and banana. Of these, bananas, apricots, pomegranates, and figs may be classed as the most profitable fruits of the summer season. But people accustomed to the English Moorpark and _Gros Peche_ apricot, which, when well-grown upon a south wall or in an orchard-house, is one rich bag of reddish amber, deliciously flavoured honey-like juice, would be much disappointed in the abundant apricots which are produced upon standard trees for the Egyptian market. They are finely flavoured, but small, hard, and fibrous; and an experienced cultivator of fruit trees states that it is very probable that the deficiency in quality and the reason that so far it has not thrived to perfection is, paradoxical as it may sound, that it matures too quickly, which is another way of saying that the climate is too fine for it. Still, there is every reason to believe that skilful management and choice acclimatisation, or the raising of new sorts, may result in the production of finer apricots than those now grown in England, where in some parts a manifest deterioration has been in progress, so great that growers are destroying their apricots and replacing them with fruit trees more suited to our sunless climate. Some years back a novelty made its appearance in the Alexandria district. This was a veritable plague of Egypt, though undoubtedly a visitant from abroad. It was a banana disease, which in its inroads played great havoc amongst the plantations. Scientific examination was brought to bear, and the cause was found to be a parasitic nematode which attacked the roots of the plant. Fortunately the trouble was local, and the infection limited in its area, while at the present time many of the plantations are free from the pest. With regard to peaches, the way is open to the enterprising and clever cultivator, for with such a constant supply of sunshine much ought to be done in the way of growing this queen of fruits. Many of us here in England, who have to trust to trees laboriously trained against a wall, or spread out and tied in to wires at the cost of many a back and neck ache, beneath the sloping glass of an orchard-house, have read with watering mouths of the standard trees of the United States, where the fallen peaches are gathered up in barrowfuls and considered of no account. Abundance rules there, and possibly it may be that this is due to the intensely hot summers of the States and their frigidly cold winters; for this seems to be the nature of the climate in the country from which the peach sprang and took its Latin name, _Persica_; for there, following upon the summer heats, winter comes down from the mountains intensely cold.